flyting

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. Contention, noisy argument.

n. Scolding, rebuke.

n. A poetic contest of insults or invective.

Etymologies

From flyte. (Wiktionary)

Examples

The poem contains more than one "flyting" -- to use the Scottish term -- and the high war of words between Satan and Abdiel in heaven, or between Satan and Gabriel on earth, could not have been handled save by a master of all the weapons of verbal fence and all the devices of wounding invective.

His epigrams (most of which are contained in _The Scourge of Folly_, undated, like others of his books) are by no means despicable; the Welsh ancestors, whom he did not fail to commemorate, seem to have endowed him with some of that faculty for lampooning and "flyting" which distinguished the Celtic race.

Update: Paul sez, "Old Norse and Old English poetry (written down in the 13th and 8th-11th centuries respectively, but often of earlier oral origins) know the tradition of" flyting, "insulting speech esp. before battle.

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Comments

More specifically, a slanging match in verse form where two poets insult each other alternately in profanely abusive verses. Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie is the pinnacle of this rich Scottish tradition.

Dunbar has the curious distinction of having been responsible for the first printed use of the word "fuck": (his 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" Collected Poems, ed. Mackenzie, cf. 'In secret place this hyndir nycht' includes the lines: "Yit be his feirris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane.") He thus established a long and noble tradition. The "powerful word" which Dunbar put into print in 1508 was not decriminalised until 1960.

His poem The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie also contains the term cuntbittin (meaning afflicted with venereal disease), the first known use of the word cunt in literature (although Chaucer used queynte as a euphemism for the word in the Canterbury Tales). The Flyting also contains the line (addressed by Kennedy to Dunbar) "Wan-fukkit funling, that natour maid ane yrle" (the phrase "wan-fukkit" might perhaps be rendered as 'unfortunately conceived', or 'ineptly conceived', in Modern English - Kennedy is accusing Dunbar of being a foundling and a dwarf).